The Mindful Hack is a Web log of Denyse O'Leary, co-author of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (HarperOne August 2007). The Mindful Hack publishes information of interest on the relationship between the mind and the brain. O'Leary also publishes the Post-Darwinist, which keeps up with the intelligent design controversy.

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Thursday, June 26, 2008

When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ...

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date. I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?

In the event,

He produced no evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment. He assumed that people want to believe in “the paranormal” because of wishful thinking.

We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level.

The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.

The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.

I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.”

In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.

Now, one of Sheldrake's subjects is animals and telepathy. I don't know what to make of animals and telepathy, but this much I know is true: As Mario Beauregard and I discussed in The Spiritual Brain, there is good reason to believe that the human mind is not as tightly bound to the brain as many believe. I don't know a clear reason that animal minds would differ from human ones in that regard.

Those who deny animal telepathy almost always also deny human telepathy - because they are materialists. Telepathy is a threat to materialism, not to human uniqueness. Put another way: Telepathic animals seem to be telepathic about the things they can understand as animals. As I wrote to a friend recently,

For example, a dog knows he loves his master, but he does not say to himself "Someday my master will die, and I will die too. I wonder which of us will die first?" Such a mental operation is not part of the type of intelligence that a dog has.

Now consider the dog who was videotaped "sensing" when his mistress was starting for home from a remote location, and beginning to show signs of alertness: The dog knows he is waiting for his mistress, but he has no idea what she is doing when she is away from home or why, let alone how these activities might affect the timing of her arrival.

The dog's telepathy, if demonstrated, functions around his existing canine intelligence; it does not admit him to new worlds of intelligence that would give him a human type of information.

That is how one might reasonably expect animal telepathy to function, and some of Sheldrake's papers do look quite interesting.